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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 June 2016
The canon law dictum that ‘dubius in fide infidelis est’ offers a seemingly definitive statement on the place of doubt and uncertainty in medieval Catholicism. Yet where Catholic teaching was open to question, doubt was inseparable from faith, not merely as its obverse but as part of the process of achieving faithfulness – the trajectory outlined by Abelard in the twelfth century. The challenge for the Church was not that doubters lacked faith, but that having tested their doubts they might end up with the wrong faith: doubt preceded assurance, one way or the other. That problem is addressed in this essay by a broad examination of the ties between faith and doubt across the late Middle Ages (from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries), arguing that uncertainty and doubt were almost unavoidable in medieval Catholicism. As the starting points in a process which could lead to heresy and despair, they also had a positive role in developing and securing orthodox faith.
1 CICan. 2: 778.
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10 Hugh of Saint Victor on the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, transl. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA, 1951), 168; for the Latin original, see PL 176, col. 330. There the third group are opinantes, perhaps making the third stage ‘opinion’ or ‘inclination’ rather than the ‘conjecture’ of the translation.
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16 PL 176, cols 327–9 (On the Sacraments, transl. Deferrari, 166).
17 PL 176, col. 329 (On the Sacraments, transl. Deferrari, 167).
18 PL 176, cols 330–1 (On the Sacraments, transl. Deferrari, 168).
19 See n. 26 below.
20 Anselm Proslogion 1 (L’œuvre de S. Anselme de Cantorbéry, 1: Monologion, Proslogion, ed. Michel Corbin [Paris, 1986], 242; The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, transl. Benedicta Ward (Harmondsworth, 1973), 244). The statement derives from Augustine, the pronouns changed to make it a first-person declaration: Sancti Aurelii Augustini in Iohannis evangelium tractatus CXXIV (CChr.SL 36, 287).
21 Abelard, ‘Prelude to the Yes and No’, transl. A. Brian Scott, in Minnis, Alastair J., Scott, A. Brian and Wallace, David, eds, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford, 1988), 87–100Google Scholar, at 99. For the Latin, see Peter Abailard, Sic et non: A Critical Edition, ed. Blanche B. Boyet and Richard McKeon (Chicago, IL, and London, 1977), 103.
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23 Abailard, Sic et non, ed. Boyet and McKeon, 115.
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26 PL 176, cols 341–2 (On the Sacraments, transl. Deferrari, 180–1).
27 See comments at PL 176, cols 333–4 (On the Sacraments, transl. Deferrari, 171–2): infidels have faith, but not the right faith.
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